Stanford and many of the biggest companies in computing will announce Friday, May 2, a joint effort to address a major missed opportunity in information technology: the dearth of software that can harness the parallelism of the multiple processors that are being built into virtually every new computer. The Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) pools the efforts of many leading Stanford computer scientists and electrical engineers with support from Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, NVIDIA, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Intel.